Left to right: Penington Institute CEO John Ryan, Pain Australia CEO Carol Bennett and Dr James Petty from Penington Institute. Photo thanks to Pain Australia.
Australia urgently needs new solutions to help counter the growing number ...

A common misconception about people who use steroids is that they all want to have enormous muscles.
“It’s not always about being huge,” says social researcher Dr Mair Underwood from the University of Queensland. “Most men ...

Injecting-related injury and disease part 1
Injecting drug use is associated with a range of health problems. The ones we’re most familiar with are overdose and viral diseases like hepatitis C and HIV. However, there are ...

Injecting-related injury and disease part 2
Frontline workers such as those in Needle and Syringe Programs play a critical role in reducing the harms associated with injecting-related injuries and disease (IRID). It can, however, be hard ...

The lowdown on new psychoactive substances
Today’s digital era presents an abundance of novel and exciting thrills, but for people who use drugs, new technologies in the form of illicit substances are fraught with inherent risk.
New ...

When painkilling drugs featuring codeine were pulled from the shelves of pharmacies across Australia in February 2018, the debate was fierce (as outlined in volume 15 edition 1 of the Anex Bulletin).
Associate Professor Suzanne Nielsen
“There ...

There is a well-established relationship between substance use and complex trauma, which usually arises from traumatic events that occurred in childhood or over a long period of time. As Canadian addiction expert Dr Gabor Maté ...

Since the end of 2014, Glasgow, Scotland has seen more than 130 diagnosed cases of HIV within the community of “public injectors” – people who inject drugs in public places and who are often experiencing ...

Australia’s Annual Overdose Report 2018 – a Penington Institute publication – is warning that benzodiazepines, including sleeping tablets and anxiety tablets, have now become a hidden epidemic in Australia and are causing an increasing number ...